![]() ![]() Alarcon held a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford. So when inventor Ramon Alarcon approached AEBN with a wooden prototype of what would eventually become the RealTouch, the company saw it as a potential salve for a wound that had been, to some extent, self-inflicted. CEO Scott Coffman would later call the decision to start PornoTube "the worst thing I've done since I was in the adult business." ![]() Instead, it sparked a number of imitator sites, where people reposted paid content from AEBN. The company had compounded the problem in 2006 when it launched the streaming site PornoTube, intended to be "the YouTube of porn." PornoTube was supposed to encourage users to pay for online porn. ![]() Like others in the adult video industry, however, AEBN faced the threat of declining revenues due to unauthorized copying and downloading. When AEBN first hatched the project, they had over 100,000 pornographic videos in their stable, spanning an impressively wide range of genres. With the RealTouch, AEBN aspired to automate the production of male orgasms. Over the centuries, technological innovation has made it possible to automate the production of an ever-growing number of goods, from clothes to chemicals to cars. AEBN's engineers worked hard to build a machine that functioned so effectively that it would make the wearer feel as if they were penetrating "the mouth, vagina, or anus of a real human," and the company frequently boasted of creating "the most lifelike simulation ever." Each of these factors-the machine's mechanics, its economics, and its affiliated labor practices-were oriented toward the goal of creating the cybersexual real: the promise to replicate the feel of sex by stimulating the senses of seeing, hearing, and-most crucially-touch. The RealTouch wasn't just a complex technical system-it was also an economic strategy and a set of social relations among networked subjects performing a new form of digitized sex work. As Marshall McLuhan eloquently put it, "resenting a new technology will not halt its progress." ![]() But indulging such impulses prevents us from understanding what the RealTouch was-and why it matters. It might be tempting to dismiss the RealTouch as another failed attempt at realizing the far-fetched and perpetually deferred fantasy of teledildonics, or to giggle at the absurdity of both the device and its users, or to condemn it as a participant in an industry that objectifies women. Having sold off the remaining units, the company posted a eulogy for the device, beaming with pride at the RealTouch for "cementing its place in the history of adult entertainment." For only $200-which included free credits for streaming encoded videos over the RealTouch servers, lubrication cartridges, and cleaning fluid-men could buy the device, described on its Amazon product page as a "High-tech Interactive Virtual Sex Simulator." However, the same month it debuted on HBO, AEBN-mired in an increasingly expensive patent dispute over the product-halted production of both the RealTouch itself and the vital replacement parts required to keep the device functioning properly. The apex-or climax-of the device's popularity and public visibility came in January 2014, when the machine was featured in the HBO late-night documentary Sex/Now. With the hype gaining steam, the RealTouch appeared poised to fulfill the lofty promises that had been made about cybersex ever since the writer Howard Rheingold popularized the term " teledildonics" in 1990 to envision the possibility of fully embodied computational sex-riffing on computer visionary Ted Nelson's idea of "dildonics," offered way back in 1974. In spite of several attempts at providing content that would appeal to gay men, AEBN targeted the RealTouch primarily toward heterosexual males.īy the end of 2013, the machine had begun to capture the public's imagination, and started getting coverage in tech blogs. Although the RealTouch initially worked only with pre-encoded videos streamed from the company's servers, the addition in 2012 of the "JoyStick" controller allowed the user to be remotely manipulated in real time, typically by a female worker who connected through a network called RealTouch Interactive. ![]()
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